The Issue
Modern manufacturing environments are equipped with multiple camera sensors, which capture information about both coarse-grained and fine-grained activities happening on the factory shop floor.
The data collected by these sensors can be employed for several use cases — building digital twins for predictive maintenance, ensuring the safety of factory personnel, quality inspection, or cross-lifecycle tracking of manufactured components for warranty and customer service purposes.
All of the use cases require scalable, cost-effective solutions for ingesting, transferring, and storing large volumes of image data across multiple storage locations, e.g., at the factory level, at a regional data center, or in a public cloud-like global location.
Preferred solutions would choose cost-effective archival storage tiers to host the bulk of the data without compromising the ability to access such data with reasonable latencies whenever required.
As an example, older data capturing detailed views of manufactured components are expected to see reduced usage for ongoing analytics and model training activities, but still need to be retained and retrieved on-demand for customer service and warranty purposes.